Expensive People (26 page)

The colored man leans toward me and touches my hair. “I'm going to be your new daddy,” he says.

The colored man leans toward me and touches my shoulders. His hand is warm and heavy.

The colored man leans toward me and puts his big hand around the back of my neck. He touches me with his mouth, and then I can feel his teeth and his tongue all soft and wet on my shoulder. “I love you,” he says. The words come back inside my head over and over, so that I am saying that to him: “I love you.”

Then I am in the water and it touches me everywhere. I start to scream. My mouth tries to make noises but I can't hear them until somebody saves me.

“Honey, wake up. Wake up!”

My mother is by the bed. She pulls me awake.

“What's wrong, Honey?” she says. “What did you dream about?”

In the light from the lamp her face is lined and not pretty.

I can hear myself crying. My throat is sore. When I see her face it makes me cry harder. What if they all come in behind her, all those people again, to look at me? The doctor had something cold that touched me. I hated them all. I wanted them to die.

But only my father comes in. He stumbles against the bureau. “Another one of them dreams, huh?” he says in a voice like the doctor's. He is walking fast but then he slows down. The first night he was in here before my mother, to help me.

My mother presses me against her. Her hands rub my back and remind me of something … the creek again, and the dead dry smell and the rush of terror like ice that came up in me, from way down in my stomach. Now it comes again and I can't stop crying.

“Hey, little girl, come on now,” my father says. He bends over me
with his two hands on his thighs, frowning. He stares at me and then at my mother. He is wondering who we are.

“We better drive her back to the doctor tomorrow,” he says.

“Leave her alone, she's all right,” my mother says.

“What the hell do you know about it?”

“She wasn't hurt, it's all in her head. It's in her head,” my mother says sharply. She leans back and looks at me as if she is trying to look inside my head. “I can take care of her.”

“Look, I can't take this much longer. It's been a year now—”

“It has not been a year!” my mother says.

My crying runs down. It always stops. Then they go out and I hear them walk in the kitchen. Alone in bed, I lie with my legs stiff and my arms stiff; something bad will happen if I move. I have to stay just the way I am when they snap off my light, or something will happen to me. I have to stay like this until morning.

They are out in the kitchen. At first they talk too low for me to hear, then louder. If they argue it will get louder. One night they talked about the nigger and I could hear them. Tommy could hear them too; I know he was awake. The nigger was caught and a state trooper that Daddy knows real well kicked him in the face—he was kicked in the face. I can't remember that face now. Yes, I can remember it. I can remember some face. He did something terrible, and what was terrible came onto me, like black tar you can't wash off, and they are sitting out there talking about it. They are trying to remember what that nigger did to me. They weren't there and so they can't remember it. They will sit there until morning and then I will smell coffee. They are talking about what to do, what to do with me, and they keep trying to remember what that nigger did to me.

My mother's voice lifts sleepily. “Oh, you bastard!” she says. Something made of glass touches something else of glass.

The rooster out back has been crowing for hours.

“Look,” says my father, and then his voice drops and I can't hear it. I lie still with my legs and arms stiff like they were made of ice or stone, trying to hear him. I can never hear him.

“… time is it?” says my mother.

The room is starting to get light and so I know everything is safe again.

The first time I read “The Molesters” I had to leave the library at once. I felt uncanny. The air seemed to be rocking about me. I hurried through the shopping area of Cedar Grove as if under a spell, and for a while I stood at the corner near the Montclair Hat Shoppe and waited in terror for something to happen.

Nothing happened.

The story seemed to me very confusing but “artistic.” Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing? I have since then stolen that copy of
The Quarterly Review of Literature
from the library, and to my shame be it said that I stole other copies of the issue from other libraries, I don't know why. I have seventeen copies here in my miserable room. They are all precisely the same.

The story takes time to figure out, but finally you see that:

1. There is only one man by the creek, only one man, and he happens to be a Negro. A Negro molester. (But rather gentle for a molester, I think. Is this Nada's sentimentalism?)
   

2. The title refers to more than one molester; hence we see that all the adults are “molesters”; they molest and are adults; they go about their business of adulthood, which consists partly (it would be selfish to say
   wholly)
   of molesting.
   

3. The child, who is much like myself, is telling the story to herself in various stages, unable to allow herself the full memory at first. It is too terrible. She gradually works up to it, is finally flooded by it and annihilated, so that the story ends upon an act of molestation. Clever Natashya Romanov, the author, who becomes herself one of the poking, prying molesters!
   

4. In symbolic terms: the child is myself, Richard Everett. Nada wrote the story to exorcise the guilt she rightly felt for abandoning me so often.
   

5. Nada, in three forms, as three adults, recognizes herself as my molester and acknowledges her guilt.
   

Have I seen something forbidden? Have I made an error?

About me on that fateful Cedar Grove day traffic moved on, traffic
lights changed and changed again, people moved by, idle and ambling and attractive. I reached out to touch the brick of a building and the brick was rough, yes, and the sensation sped through my fingertips and into the depths of my body, assuring me of one thing: I was alive.

Molesters are all about us.

What can I do to be saved?

If the child-hero of the story cannot understand what has happened to her, how are the rest of us to know? I include you, my readers. How will we know what mad acts were performed upon us, what open-heart surgery, what stealthy home brain surgery? Can we trust our well-meaning memories, our feeble good natures, which want to remember only the best about our parents, which brush aside ugly thoughts?

… Is this an ordinary disintegration, a routine textbook case, or is there something woeful and transcendent about it? Imagine Hamlet stunted at eleven years of age—do I claim too much for myself? Am I classic or trivial? Am I archetypical or stereotypical? Is all suffering too familiar?

Think of the power of words, my readers! Everything depends upon the style, the tone, the exact gesture, the divine play of words. Those anemic written signs Nada played with, having the power to raise up in me a seizure of trembling of the sort I hadn't had since the Johns Behemoth orgy in the Record Room—what a secret is behind them! There are some of us, sick people and madmen, who should not be shown symbolic matter. Pictures, designs, words, are too much for us. We fall into them and never hit the bottom; it's like falling and falling into one of your own dreams. We make too much of things, we sick people and madmen. Words mean too much to us. You think only food excites me, my readers? You think all the food I devour (those disgusting bones over in the corner, those heaps of emptied tin cans!) means anything to me? Not at all, not at all—bulk to induce sleep and peace, nothing more. I am going to eat my way out of this life, like Nada's noble kinsman. Food means nothing but words mean everything! You see how I have become my mother's son.

Without her writing she would have been just Nada in the kitchen, Nada in her bathrobe upstairs, Nada on the telephone, Nada here, there, hugging me, turning vaguely from me—just that dark-haired lovely woman with the slightly knobby knees and wrists who, when she was in a hurry, walked along in a girlish, bobbing way with one
hand bent sharply at the wrist as if to show that awkward little wrist bone. Yes, I would have loved her the way I loved Father, though probably more than I loved Father, but when I could read what she had written, creep and crawl and snuggle inside her brain, I began to see that the Nada who lived with us was just another visitor in our house, not as real or as colorful as Mrs. Hofstadter. That Nada was pretending. Wasn't she always saying to Father, “I admire you, I don't understand you so I admire you,” and wasn't she always growing vague, remote, her gaze drifting away to the ceiling, and who was this Sheer? What could he give her that we couldn't? No, the woman I called “Nada” (that stupid name, she was right) was just a liar. She cheated all the time.

You who've never read the secret words of the familiar, domesticated people you love, you who've never snuggled into their brains and looked out through their eyes, how can you understand what I felt? It's as if I had opened a door and saw Nada not as she wanted to seem to us, but Nada as she really was, a stranger, a person Father and I did not know and had no connection with. We are accustomed to people existing in orbit around us, and we dread thinking of their deaths because of the slight tug we will feel when their presence is gone—we'll be drawn out closer to the frigidity of darkness, space, death. We are accustomed to these smaller planets always showing the same sides to us, familiar, predictable, secure, sound, sane, accommodating, but when I looked through Nada's eyes I knew that I had been tricked, that she showed only her narrowest, most ignorant side to me, and that she had cheated me all my life.

Did I still love her?

I loved her more than ever, of course. Mothers who cringe and beg for love get nothing, and they deserve nothing, but mothers like Nada who are always backing out of the driveway draw every drop of love out of us. What's awful is that love is an emotion you can't do anything with. It has no value. We who love hopelessly are like noblemen in exile, an exile with no kingdom to look back at, to remember. Our beloved exists within the perfect halo of her own consciousness, selfish and adored, protected from us by the very violence of the love we feel. Is this a boy's love for his mother, you're wondering? Eh? Oh, let it be anything—any kind of love! I had enough love for any kind! I could outlast lovers, husbands, pals—and let me mention my most formidable
rival, a woman with handsome olive skin, eyes slightly slanted (make-up? Oriental blood?), who wore dark wool, heavy jewelry and had advanced degrees in European history. She had been Nada's friend for a few months one winter. I remember them laughing softly together, that coy, sly tilting of their heads that meant secrets, intimacy, a closeness Father never knew and I certainly never knew, as I hulked about in the den, pretending to be looking for a book. Dr. Lippick, goddam you! But she disappeared finally, I don't know how, drawn out into someone else's orbit or knocked askew by someone in Nada's orbit, for Nada was always moving on, you know, like any major constellation, driving onward toward whatever it was she believed she was seeking, and along with her went satellites and particles of dust, among them myself.

I said I was a nobleman in exile and that's garbage of course, it's sentimental bombast, and it isn't true either that I had no kingdom or memory of one. My kingdom was the place we were going to enter finally, Nada and I. Together. Time was passing us, like a gentle spring breeze that has come from some innocent cove thousands of miles away, and overtakes us, and passes us by. I had to get us safely into that kingdom.

Was it that day or another day, after reading “The Molesters” again, that I made my purchase? Let's say it was that same afternoon. At about one o'clock I read the story, and at two o'clock I went into a small shop called Ax's Sporting Goods. I asked the man shyly about a rifle. He chuckled the way Father did and asked me how old I was. I looked at some rifles, touched them, smelled them. A rocking, nauseated sensation rose in me but I recognized it—it was familiar, it didn't alarm me. It wasn't a bad feeling. It was like coming out of a drug-induced sleep: waking is painful but you want it badly. You want it more than anything in the world, though it's easier to sleep; you could sleep forever and spend no energy. Ah, if I woke I would do many things! I would grow into manhood and be a son worthy of my mother! If I woke …

In the end I went down the street to a drugstore and there bought a magazine called “He-Man Guns.” In the back of the magazine (which was partly a comic book) I found the grubby little ads I craved: “Are Guns Your Hobby?” “For Target Practice” “Halt!” “New Amazing Ballpoint Pen Gun $3.98!” “German Sniper Rifle Used by Mad Fanatic SS Men—Limited Number!” “Assemble at Home—Be a Sharpshooter!

Protect Yourself at All Times!” Crummy drawings of rifles, machine guns, pistols, revolvers, bazookas, cannons, anything. “Own Your Own Cannon! Powerful Enough to Down a Tank!” Why not own your own tank too? But no tanks were for sale in this magazine.

Read my desperation in the rapidity with which I settled upon one of these ads, distinguished in no way from the others, bought some envelopes in the drugstore and took out one of them, made out the coupon at the bottom of the ad, and actually slid into that envelope along with the coupon several handfuls of dollar bills Father had given me off and on, forgetfully, spasmodically, the way he sometimes offered people chewing gum or free tickets he'd been handed himself, forgetfully and spasmodically, everything accumulating in his pockets. And I bought a stamp in the stamp machine, was cheated of a penny, and addressed the envelope in my boyish block letters, and mailed it down at the corner. It took no more than five minutes and I was on my way.